Syndication – the process of publishing your articles as a professional services firm on additional channels apart from your own website – is a simple question of ‘where’s the biggest audience?’ for many firms.
There are of course more complicated questions about:
- what the syndication service gives you in terms of reporting
- how much traffic does it refer back to your website
- does it link back to you to help your SEO presence
- what about ‘content duplication penalties’ and more
but a relatively simple question given the investment into article writing made by lawyers and accountants these days (2.2 articles per fee earner per year) is how many more eyeballs can I reach with the same piece of content via syndication?
Based on the custom Google Analytics reporting we provide professional services firm clients we looked at 50 articles written in Australia across 28 law firms between July-Dec 2016 in an attempt to answer this question about syndication. And a related interesting question: how many reads does the average law firm article get anyway?
We can (and do) answer how your publications are doing as a whole with our website benchmarking reports but the average number of article reads for our 50 article sample was 154 reads.
So 154 reads per article on your own website is our baseline number which we compare syndication reads to.
For our syndication data we based the study on Mondaq (full disclosure: we are the Australian and NZ resellers for Mondaq which is why we have access).
First we looked (again via GA) at the average article reads you get from people sent from Mondaq.com to your own website (syndication/referral traffic).
Mondaq increases the reads on articles on your own website by 12% on average (you also get people sent to lawyer bios and other pages on your site but we’re just looking at articles here).
We then calculated the average reads on Mondaq.com itself for your articles. Because Mondaq’s proprietary readership reporting includes print requests, forwards etc we used Google Analytics again to compare apples to apples.
The average number of reads our 50 Australian article sample got on Mondaq.com was 198 (we aren’t able to track reads via other channels we syndicate your articles through like Westlaw or Factiva).
So in a nutshell (at least via Mondaq) syndication gets you:
- 12% more reads per article on your own website
- 129% more reads per article on Mondaq itself
- And at least 141% more reads per article in total by syndicating
Photo by flattop341 
